The 1.0 build got broken a while back, and Shoes never got into fixing it since there is 2.0 coming out soon(ish). So you'll have to use the nightly, which is much better any ways.
Just to get a bit more info, which operating system are you running on? I'm assuming you're on windows for now.
You said you downloaded the new 2015-08-06 nightly build of OpenXCom? And then you installed commendations on top of it?
I expect you have the same problem someone else had earlier: You are trying to apply the Commendations custom executable on a nightly that's much too recent. In this case, newer is not better, newer means different codes from how it was when Shoes developed the latest version of Commendations, which will cause problems.
Get a nightly that matches the date of the latest Commendations release, then apply the latest Commendations release on top of it. That should work.